08/10/2026
What Happened to Blackfeet Firefighting Crews?
And Could Their Decline Be Part of the Reason Our Summers Have Become So Smoky?
Growing up on the Blackfeet Reservation in the 1970s and 1980s, I don't remember summers being like this.
That's not to say we never had wildfire smoke. We did. I remember the Yellowstone fires in 1988, and every few years we'd get those hazy days when smoke drifted across the reservation.
But I don't remember weeks on end of gray skies. I don't remember walking outside summer after summer and smelling smoke. I don't remember looking west and barely being able to see Divide Mountain through the haze.
Now it seems to happen almost every year.
For a long time, I assumed the reason was pretty straightforward: climate change. Temperatures are warmer, snow melts earlier, fire seasons last longer, and forests and grasslands can become dangerously dry. Scientists have documented those changes. I'm not questioning them.
But the more I thought about the summers I remembered as a kid, the more something else kept nagging at me.
Where did all the firefighters go?
People who grew up around Browning during those years probably remember what happened when fire season got busy.
It seemed like half the town left.
The call would come, buses would line up, and Blackfeet firefighters would head west. Fathers and mothers. Sons and daughters. Cousins, uncles, neighbors. Sometimes hundreds of people from the reservation were out fighting fires across Montana and throughout the West.
I remember families gathering when the crews left and meeting them again when they came home. And when those firefighters got paid, some of that money went right back into our communities. Families would head to Great Falls or Kalispell for school clothes and supplies. Bills got paid. Food went on the table.
Firefighting wasn't just a summer job here. For a lot of Blackfeet families, it was part of life.
For years I wondered if maybe childhood had made those crews seem bigger in my memory than they really were.
Then I started looking at the numbers.
If anything, my memory may have underestimated them.
Historical records show that the Blackfeet Reservation once supplied one of the largest Native firefighting workforces in the country.
A 2001 report documented that during the 2000 fire season, the Blackfeet Agency dispatched 1,040 firefighters on Type 2 hand crews alone.
Think about that for a minute.
More than a thousand firefighters—and that figure didn't include camp crews, saw crews, overhead personnel, strike-team leaders, division supervisors or the Chief Mountain Hotshots.
More than 1,000 Blackfeet firefighters were trained and available for dispatch the following season as well.
Those numbers confirm something longtime residents already knew. The Blackfeet Reservation wasn't just sending a few crews out during fire season.
Our people were a major part of the firefighting workforce.
And it wasn't something that appeared overnight.
During the 1997 fire season, The Washington Post reported that roughly 400 Blackfeet firefighters were waiting for assignments during what had turned into a slow fire year. The paper also noted that firefighting had brought millions of dollars into the reservation economy in previous years. Other reporting from that period put the number of available firefighters even higher.
Compare that with where we are today.
Recently, a longtime member of Blackfeet Fire Management talked about the work involved in rebuilding the reservation's hand-crew program. After years of recruiting people, training them, getting them through physical testing and meeting federal requirements, putting together a single 20-person crew was considered a significant accomplishment.
Twenty people.
On a reservation that once had more than a thousand firefighters available.
How did that happen?
I don't think there's going to be one simple answer.
Federal hiring practices have changed. Training and certification requirements have changed. Physical standards, drug testing and other requirements may have reduced the number of people willing or able to participate. The old firefighting generation got older. Young people have different employment opportunities today.
All of those things may be part of the explanation.
We should also be willing to ask harder questions.
Did federal funding decisions hurt Native firefighting programs? Did changes in dispatch practices affect tribal crews differently? Were Blackfeet firefighters given the same opportunities as other crews as the system changed?
And was discrimination part of it?
I don't know.
Native people have a long history of unequal treatment under federal policy, and plenty of Blackfeet people have their own stories about discrimination. That doesn't prove discrimination caused the decline of our firefighting workforce. I haven't found evidence strong enough to make that claim.
But it is a legitimate question, and it deserves to be investigated along with everything else.
Then there is another question I've been thinking about.
What did the West lose when all those firefighters disappeared?
Anyone familiar with wildland firefighting knows how important initial attack can be. When a fire starts, getting enough trained people on it quickly can make the difference between catching it small and watching it turn into something much harder to control.
Of course, there are days when no number of firefighters can easily stop a fire. Hot temperatures, drought, wind and extremely dry fuels can overwhelm even a strong response.
And climate change has made those conditions worse.
But that's exactly why manpower might matter even more now.
What happens when longer, hotter and drier fire seasons collide with a firefighting workforce that isn't what it used to be?
And Blackfeet wasn't the only reservation supplying firefighters. Native crews from reservations across the West have been part of wildland firefighting for generations.
I want to be careful here.
I have not found a study showing that the decline in Blackfeet firefighters caused the increase in wildfire smoke we experience today. It would be irresponsible to claim that it did.
There are too many factors involved.
But I also haven't found much research asking what happened when this enormous pool of experienced Native firefighters declined—or what that loss meant for initial attack capacity across the Northern Rockies.
Maybe the effect was small.
Maybe it was significant.
We won't know unless somebody looks.
What we do know is that something valuable disappeared from this reservation.
Firefighting brought millions of dollars into our economy. It gave young people seasonal work and, for some, a path into a career. Blackfeet firefighters became Hotshots, engine bosses, crew bosses, division supervisors and incident commanders.
They learned how to work under pressure. They traveled. They led people. They brought money home.
There was pride in it, too.
That's something that's harder to put into a government report.
When those buses pulled out of Browning, they weren't carrying anonymous federal workers. They were carrying our relatives and our neighbors. They were Blackfeet firefighters heading out to protect communities all over the West.
Maybe rebuilding that workforce deserves serious consideration.
Not because doing so would somehow solve the wildfire crisis. It wouldn't. The West is warmer and drier than it used to be, and some fires today behave in ways that would have been difficult to stop even with the crews we had decades ago.
But imagine if Blackfeet once again had hundreds of trained firefighters ready to go.
Imagine what that could mean for young people looking for work.
Imagine the money returning to families and circulating through Browning and the surrounding communities.
And maybe—this is the part I think deserves real research—it could also put more trained people in position to catch some fires before they become the enormous fires that fill our valleys with smoke.
I don't know if that hypothesis will prove true.
But the larger question remains.
How did we go from more than a thousand Blackfeet firefighters to struggling to put together a single 20-person hand crew?
Was it federal policy? Budgets? Hiring requirements? Changes in the fire program? Economics? A loss of interest among younger people? Discrimination?
Or, as is usually the case, was it a little bit of everything?
Those answers are out there somewhere—in federal records, old dispatch reports, budgets, employment records and, just as importantly, in the memories of the Blackfeet men and women who actually fought those fires.
We should find them.
Because before we accept smoky summers, fewer opportunities for our young people, and the disappearance of a proud Blackfeet firefighting tradition as simply the way things are now, I think we owe it to ourselves to understand what happened.
This article isn't the answer.
It's the beginning of the question.
